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>I don't use Windows at the moment and don't really mount network drives, either. That might be a good alternative to consider. Regarding Windows: I have succ

>I don't use Windows at the moment and don't really mount network drives, either. That might be a good alternative to consider. Regarding Windows: I have successfully mirrored a notebook and a desktop[0] (single user) with Windows using robocopy, which is a utility that comes with Windows (used to be part of the Resource Kit but I think it is now in the base product). When I say "mirror" I mean I can use either machine as my current workstation without any loss of data, as long as I run the "sync" script at each switch. I use "net use" to temporarily mount a few critical drives on the local network, then robocopy does its work, it has maybe 85% of the same functionality of rsync (which I also used extensively when administering corporate servers and workstations). Back in the DOS days, I wrote my own very simple version of the same thing using C, but when robocopy came along I was glad to stop maintaining my own effort. [0]or two desktops, using removable high-capacity media like Iomega zip drives.

EvanAnderson 4y ago
Robocopy is very nice but has no delta compression functionality. For things like file server migrations (where I want to preserve ACLs, times, etc) robocopy is my go-to tool. I've used the cwRsync[0] binary distribution of rsync on Windows for backups. I found it worked very well for simple file backups. I never did get around to trying to combine it with Volume Shadow Copy to make consistent backups of the registry and applications like Microsoft SQL Server. (I wouldn't expect to get a bootable restore from such a backup, though.) [0] https://www.itefix.net/cwrsync https://www.itefix.net/cwrsync
- rzzzt 4y ago
  I used QtdSync, another frontend backed by a Windows rsync binary. A nice feature was that it supported the "duplicate entire target folder with hard links, then overwrite changes only"-style on NTFS volumes, so I could have lots of browseable point-in-time backup folders without consuming extra disk space: https://www.qtdtools.de/page.php?tool=0&sub=1&lang=en https://www.qtdtools.de/page.php?tool=0&sub=1&lang=en
gary_0 4y ago
I use MSYS2 on Windows in order to run regular rsync and other such utilities. It's served me very well for years. I also have some bash scripts that I can conveniently run on either Linux or Windows via MSYS2.
- paravz 4y ago
  I switched from Cygwin+rsync(over ssh) to robocopy+samba to speed up backups (up to saturating 1Gbit connection): for %i in (C D) do robocopy %i:\ \\backup-server\b-%COMPUTERNAME%\%i /MIR /DCOPY:T /NFL /NDL /R:0 /W:1 /XJ /XD "System Volume Informatiowsn" /XD "$RECYCLE.BIN" /XD "Windows" /XD "Windows.old"

EvanAnderson 4y ago

Robocopy is very nice but has no delta compression functionality. For things like file server migrations (where I want to preserve ACLs, times, etc) robocopy is my go-to tool. I've used the cwRsync[0] binary distribution of rsync on Windows for backups. I found it worked very well for simple file backups. I never did get around to trying to combine it with Volume Shadow Copy to make consistent backups of the registry and applications like Microsoft SQL Server. (I wouldn't expect to get a bootable restore from such a backup, though.) [0] https://www.itefix.net/cwrsync https://www.itefix.net/cwrsync

rzzzt 4y ago
I used QtdSync, another frontend backed by a Windows rsync binary. A nice feature was that it supported the "duplicate entire target folder with hard links, then overwrite changes only"-style on NTFS volumes, so I could have lots of browseable point-in-time backup folders without consuming extra disk space: https://www.qtdtools.de/page.php?tool=0&sub=1&lang=en https://www.qtdtools.de/page.php?tool=0&sub=1&lang=en

gary_0 4y ago

I use MSYS2 on Windows in order to run regular rsync and other such utilities. It's served me very well for years. I also have some bash scripts that I can conveniently run on either Linux or Windows via MSYS2.

paravz 4y ago
I switched from Cygwin+rsync(over ssh) to robocopy+samba to speed up backups (up to saturating 1Gbit connection): for %i in (C D) do robocopy %i:\ \\backup-server\b-%COMPUTERNAME%\%i /MIR /DCOPY:T /NFL /NDL /R:0 /W:1 /XJ /XD "System Volume Informatiowsn" /XD "$RECYCLE.BIN" /XD "Windows" /XD "Windows.old"